Old Git's Guide to D&D

Ahhh, you damned whippersnappers wouldn't know good gaming if it bit you on the nose! Whuzzat, Final Fantasy? Bah! A kid that scrawny can't lift a sword that big! You damn kids with your high tech gizmos and your androgyny. Lemme tell you about some REAL roleplaying...

Take some time outta saving the world and cut that damn hair!

Contents

When I was your age, we didn't have any of this newfangled online play. Heck, we were lucky to play our games by candlelight! When we wanted to go slay dragons, we got a pencil, some paper, a good old-fashioned d20, and if you really had money to burn, some miniatures to keep track of your fighter or magic-user or whatever. And we didn't have none of your super-powered champions of existence, neither! We took one class and stuck with it, come hell, high water, or encumbrance!

When we made a character, we had to record all the information about them by hand. We didn't have no fancypants computer take care of it for us, no siree! We rolled three dice straight up, and if you were really lucky, you could choose where the results went! You had your five basic ability scores, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, and Wisdom. It'll be a cold day in hell before I recognize that bastard child Charisma as a proper ability score, I tell you what!

After that, you decide your "skills" and your "feats". Yes, when we wanted to let our characters do everything, we thought of EVERYTHING, dagnabbit! There's a reason so many characters are some o' them flimsy rogues! Turn down that music! And if you wanted a new feat, you had to earn it! We got one feat every three levels (unless you were one o' them crazy fighters) and we were HAPPY to even get that! You whippersnappers take everything for granted nowadays...

You ever play Monopoly, sonny? Nah, you kids won't play anything unless it can download ringtones and take pictures... might be useful if you bothered to listen to real music, like our bards, who had some real baritone! Anyway, in Monopoly, you have the banker, who takes care of the money for the other players. In Dungeons & Dragons, you had what we called the Dungeon Master, or the "DM", since you punks like to abbreviate every last goldurned thing like your vocal cords are shot. The Dungeon Master is like the banker: everything the players don't control, the Dungeon Master does. Whuzzat? "Why not just use a computer?" BOY get back here so I can smack the filth from your mouth! You kids wouldn't know a good Dungeon Master if he power attacked you for 50 damage!

We'd all gather around in ol' cousin Freddie's basement, and the Dungeon Master would tell us just what sort of dungeon we were in. And we didn't have any of this magical robot facility nonsense: men were men, women were women, and dungeons were dungeons! We'd roll the dice to make choices about how things would end up, and hopefully nobody died at the end of it! Now that's quality gaming.

Now, see, in your fancy-schmancy Fatal Fantasy, you kids can just throw around fireballs just like you throw around your money! Well, I grew up in a recession, which built my character, and I sure as hell didn't have infinite magic power, and you bet that built my character! If we wanted to use a spell, we had to get up at the crack o' dawn and prepare it, and we got to use that spell ONCE in the following day. And if we even wanted to cast that spell at all, we didn't DARE touch armor! Unless you were a cleric, but nobody in their right mind wanted to be a cleric anyhow. Pull up your pants!

You damn kids are all so disorganized. You got spellswords, spellthieves, holyswords, holythieves, thiefswords, and all sorts of ridiculous combinations, but nothing that takes good, honest work! No, see, when we were in charge, it wasn't like some brothel where ya slept with whatever class you wanted. You had four different class types, mainly. Oh sure, there were always the oddball classes like monks, but I didn't spend seven years in the Citadel of Vi'Etnam just so you monks could run up and show everyone up with your fancypants karate!

Fighters was a catch-all term we had for anyone who stabbed things with a sword or cut them up with an axe. No magic, but the meanest, toughest, most ornery fellas you ever did see. And they used actual weapons in my day, not things like keys or whips! Not only that, they wore actual armor, not canvases covered with random splotches of paint! They were going into dangerous wilderness, after all, not the Looney Tunes Christmas Show!

Magic-users were scrawny little whelps that could cast spells to turn you into a frog or fly through the sky like a blimp. In my day, you never saw a fella say so much as "hocus pocus" unless he was wearing nothin' but a bathrobe! You kids don't appreciate this, nowadays, since you've all got spells you can cast even if you're locked in a steel vault. Only one man in my day could do that, and he was Harry Houdini! And y'know what happened to him? Dead, because he messed with the natural order of things! Cut your hair!

Rogues were also pretty skinny, and they didn't have any magic they could cast. So why bother playing as one? Because someone needs to make the lightning-powered trains run on time, and rogues were the only ones who learned anything besides killin', because they valued good, hard, honest work! You think John Wilkes Booth got to be so famous because he just clapped his hands and summoned a zombie to beat Honest Abe with a railroad spike? Heck no, sonny, he worked hard to be the well-known upstanding individual he was in those days.

Clerics are... well, heck, you wouldn't know, since you never go to church. You just sit at home, listening to your damn Satan music. Anyway, clerics were people who cast healing spells in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. They could fight decently, if you thought using a two-by-four as an actual weapon was "groovy", and they could wear armor too. But, y'see, nobody wanted to sit back and wait for everyone else to screw up so they could fix it up. We have kids for that, and a bunch of ungrateful whiny kids at that! When was the last time you got me and my dear Gertrude a proper gift? Never, that's when! Get off my lawn!

Ever heard of Tolkien, boy? No, you wouldn't, not unless he got into one of them motion pictures! Well, in my day, we had races that had literature behind them! Elves, dwarves, orcs, halflings, and maybe gnomes if you were still in diapers. What've you got, then? Lizard people? Bah, lizard people ain't good for nothing but killin! What the hell is that, some kinda Playboy bunny? GET OFF MY DAMN LAWN WITH YOUR FILTH-FLARN-FILTH!

Y'see, back in the old days, there used to be all this crazy talk about Dungeons and Dragons leading to Satanism! Boy, that's crazy, I tell ya: I have always been a firm supporter of our lord Jesus Christ. We ain't never summoned any demons, because none of us was stupid enough to do so. You kids, when you get your experience points, you think that you'll be able to hold onto them forever. We didn't have that luxury back then, if we wanted to call up a burning demon from Hades to eat people's souls, we had to spend our hard-earned experience to do it, and then we had to BARTER with the damned thing! No sir, if you ask me, all you need to kill a civili-- peasant is one good ol' smack in the head with a warhammer!

Some hooligans even thought that it led to Satanic murders OUTSIDE of the game! Load of hogwash if you ask me. Why, anytime one of your Fatal Fallacy games comes out I swear there's a whole new group of Kool-Aid drinkin' crazies shooting up their schools! Dungeons and Dragons ain't never told me to kill anyone and you can't prove otherwise! Where's my belt?!